


It's a Free World

by Melibe



Series: The New Plan [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/F, Future Fic, Happy Ending, Humor, Ineffable Bureaucracy (Good Omens), Other, Post-Canon, Torture, Wings, angels have issues with free will, but it's just a couple sentences and not too graphic, demons don't understand politics, still definitely torture, they're okay now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21828706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melibe/pseuds/Melibe
Summary: Michael sighs. Every Earth operative since Aziraphale has been so jumpy, when she’d expect just the opposite. All they have to do is not betray Heavento the point of spewing literal Hellfire, and they’ll be a cut above. But still they’re full of nerves and apologies.Well, she supposes the horn on her desk doesn’t do much to set them at ease.
Relationships: Beelzebub/Dagon (Good Omens), Beelzebub/Gabriel (Good Omens), Beelzebub/Satan | Lucifer (Good Omens), Dagon/Michael (Good Omens), Gabriel/Michael (Good Omens)
Series: The New Plan [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1569919
Comments: 9
Kudos: 67





	It's a Free World

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place a few years after [Make Game of That Which Makes as Much of Thee](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21129728/chapters/50283776), in which Beelzebub and Gabriel are exiled from Hell and Heaven, respectively. I wanted to play with the perspective of Heaven and Hell, and especially Michael, for whom I have a weird kind of sympathy. And Dagon, who is the best.

“Six thousand years, and humans still can’t figure this out.” Uriel shakes her head in disgust.

“Six thousand years and six decades,” corrects Michael. But she’ll concede the point. Humans are simply the worst at picking up their trash.

First it was the sewage problem in the cities, streets paved with layers of human and animal filth. Then they seemed to solve it with plumbing, but they’d only stuffed everything underground, and the proliferation of fatbergs combined with sea level rise showed just how tenuous a solution that was.

Next it was the plastic—ubiquitous, indestructible, choking every waterway and infiltrating every ecosystem.

Of all the Horsemen, Michael had been most impressed by Pollution. She’d even thought, in a detached sort of way, that it was a pity to schedule Armageddon so soon after they arrived on the scene. She had a feeling they were just hitting their stride.

Then the indefinite deferral of the end times gave humans a chance to engineer several different strains of plastic-eating bacteria. Unfortunately, when these bacteria were released into the wild, their metabolic byproducts interacted with various environmental toxins to produce floods of malignant goo.

It’s just another of the endless disasters humans seem to enjoy visiting upon themselves. Michael might not even have noticed, if one of her Earth operatives hadn’t gotten stuck in the goo and discorporated.

“I am so terribly sorry, it was awfully careless.” He keeps apologizing as Uriel processes his paperwork.

“These things happen,” says Michael, her mind only half on the task at hand. She received a message earlier today that made her nostrils flare and her throat sting with the scent of brimstone.

_New Plan or No Plan? We need to talk in person. Pick a time and place._

She doesn’t know how to reply, and that’s something Michael hates—not knowing.

“Bring these to the corporation department and they’ll get you sorted out,” says Uriel, sounding bored, and the discorporated angel nods and bows and thanks them both more profusely than necessary.

Michael sighs. Every Earth operative since Aziraphale has been so jumpy, when she’d expect just the opposite. All they have to do is not betray Heaven _to the point of spewing literal Hellfire_ , and they’ll be a cut above. But still they’re full of nerves and apologies.

Well, she supposes the horn on her desk doesn’t do much to set them at ease.

It’s been five years since Heaven lost Gabriel, or Gabriel lost Heaven, whichever way you want to slice it, and Michael will never admit that she misses him. How can you miss someone who’s been a constant presence through the millennia, a trusted colleague in work and war, a companion whose thoughts are as familiar as your own?

She never wanted to hurt him. She just meant to be practical, forming a contingency plan in case he was compromised. She saw it as a last resort, but to the others it quickly became a first resort. A plan they were not merely willing, but eager, to carry out. A plan they were sniffing around for any excuse to use. And when the excuse presented itself—

_“It’s time.” Uriel nodded. “Either the Adversary destroys him, or we must.”_

_“We aren’t going to_ destroy _him,” Michael reminded her._

_Sandalphon waved this away. “As good as. But what if Gabriel doesn’t fight? Do we still—?”_

_“He’ll fight,” said Michael wearily, knowing he was too straightforward to do otherwise. She saw the set expressions on the other archangels’ faces and almost told them to wait, to reassess and reconsider. But Heaven does not doubt. Heaven is certainty and inexorable purpose. This must be the right thing to do, because apparently it’s the thing that they’re doing._

_Uriel touched Michael’s shoulder. “We’ll be there, Michael. You can rely on us.”_

_Yes, thought Michael, I know. You are altogether too reliable. And she headed off to tell Gabriel that Satan was spoiling for a fight._

Remembering the nightmarish evening on the Broomway that followed, she wonders how it might have ended differently. If she hadn’t given her sword to Beelzebub. If she hadn’t lent her strength to Gabriel’s smiting. Did she save him from destruction at the hands of the Enemy in order to sacrifice him on the altar of Heaven’s conviction? Was it the right thing to do, just because it was the thing that she did?

Michael doesn’t know, and she fucking _hates_ not knowing.

“Is it playing music?” Uriel asks, jarring Michael from her thoughts. She looks up to see the other angel staring at Gabriel’s horn in confusion, almost alarm.

“It does that sometimes.” Michael has noticed faint harmonies occasionally slipping from the mouth of the horn, somehow both ethereal and unfamiliar. There are chimes and strings and drums, even voices, but they always fade away before she can catch any words.

Michael has never handled the horn when the music sounds, never lifted it to her ear to listen more carefully. That would be ridiculous.

“It doesn’t sound like horn music,” observes Uriel.

“No, it doesn’t,” says Michael, and it comes out sharper than she intended, shutting down both the music and Uriel’s inquiry. 

The other archangel stands and gives Michael a brisk nod. “I’ll let you get back to work, then,” she says, and walks down the hall.

Michael scowls at the horn. Maybe it serves to remind the other angels that _virtue must be ever vigilant_ , but right now it’s just reminding her of the administrative headache Gabriel left behind. Why did he have to go and get himself exiled when Heaven was halfway through its biggest reorganization since the Fall? Mere hours after the events on the Broomway, finding herself elbow-deep in unfamiliar paperwork, Michael had sent Sandalphon back to Earth to collect Gabriel. Not because she _missed_ him, of course not, but because he was the only angel with all the details on this bloody New Plan.

Gabriel had sent Sandalphon straight back to Heaven, comatose.

Michael found him in a heap on the spotless floor, healed his head injury and listened to him rant. She convinced him to rest for a while, then convened a meeting of archangels. Somehow, by the time they gathered together, everyone—even Sandalphon—had realized there was no point in seeking out Gabriel for either information or revenge. They turned their attention to the critical task of deciding whether to proceed with the New Plan. They listed pros and cons, assigned analyses and reports, and set a timeline for making the final decision. In addition to coordinating the overall effort, Michael took charge of negotiations with Downstairs.

Which brings her back to the message still waiting on her phone.

* * *

Dagon sometimes wishes that her memory worked like a filing system. She’s listening to some lesser demon rant about Hastur’s recent activities with a bottle of glue and a Hellhound turd, and it would be handy if she could remember his name just by cross-referencing “drippy nose, bat-ears, annoying voice.”

The demon seems to think that because Dagon fought Hastur tooth and nail for this position, she’ll welcome any stupid complaint about him. But Hastur is her second-in-command now, and who is this bloody demon, anyway?

Dagon wants to eat him, but that might not be the right approach. She’s still figuring out her management style, wishes she’d gotten a few more pointers from her predecessor. Her fingers tighten reflexively on the black feather in her pocket. 

She forces them to relax as she stares at the drippy-nosed demon. “What’s your name?”

He looks offended. “You don’t know?”

Dagon wonders if she’s eaten him before. It’s been a lot of years in Hell, okay, and too many demons to remember. That’s why she keeps _files_ , for Satan’s sake. “Your name,” she repeats, showing all her teeth.

“Botis, my lord, and let me note that technically I am a President—”

“I do love technicalities,” Dagon murmurs, flipping through the B’s with diabolical speed. “There you are. _Botis, President._ I see you have quite the history of frivolous complaints.”

She drops the demon’s thick, mildewed folder on her desk with a thud. Botis eyes it uncertainly. “Is that—but I never—”

“You didn’t think the _Lord of the Files_ would have a file on you?” Dagon rolls her eyes as she looks through it.

“Uh,” he says.

“Oh look, I did eat you,” she says, coming across the relevant paperwork. “How interesting. All right, just fill this out, and I’ll add it to your file.” She slaps a complaint form on the desk and looks up expectantly.

President Botis is gone. Dagon smiles.

“You and your files,” mutters Hastur, who’s been lurking between cabinets. “Not a proper weapon.”

“They work,” says Dagon, unsurprised by his appearance. She expects Hastur to lurk everywhere, at all times.

“It’s stupid,” he grumbles. “Should fight fire with fire.”

“He wasn’t on fire.”

“Could of been.” Hastur sniffs. “Wasted opportunity.”

Dagon shakes her head as she replaces Botis’ file in the drawer. She glances at her phone, which she’s been expecting—not _hoping_ , demons don’t _hope_ —to ring all day. It’d be nice to have Hastur lurking somewhere else when it does. “Why don’t you check up on our Earth operatives?”

“Ain’t the angels keeping us updated?”

“Shared oversight doesn’t mean we trust those blessed fools to do _everything_.” Dagon is tempted to ask, _Want another Crowley disaster?_ But Hastur would get mad, and she doesn’t want to risk a fight here in the midst of her precious files.

Fortunately the Duke seems willing to shove off. He slouches toward the escalators, grumbling something about _heavenly wankers_.

Dagon flops into a chair and pulls the feather from her pocket. She ruffles the vanes and smooths them again, back and forth, a restless tic developed over the last few years. Yeah, Dagon has kept this feather for years, so what? It’s not like she had to go out of her way to collect it—it literally fell in her lap. 

If she closes her eyes now, she’ll see it all over again.

_Satan was ripping out Beelzebub’s feathers in handfuls, filling the air with black clouds of them. The plucking went on and on, bald patches spreading across the prince’s wide wings until they were nothing but raw skin stretched over bone, and then he broke the bones, one at a time, the sickening cracks the only sound in the conference room. Beelzebub kept perfectly silent, though blood trickled down their chin from where they’d bitten their lips and tongue._

_They never tried to fight him off, just stood there and took it. Their stubborn silence was gasoline on the inferno of his rage. He paused in his methodical torture, grabbed their face and made them look at him._

_“Was it worth it?” he growled. “Giving yourself to that pretty angel, was it worth this?”_

_Dagon’s hands were sweating around the feather she’d clenched. She wanted to beg Beelzebub to give the answer he wanted, to admit their terrible mistake. Maybe if they fell to the floor and groveled, he would stop. Then their bones could mend, and their feathers could grow back. This horror would be behind them._

_But Beelzebub stared back at the Devil himself, and said nothing. Snarling, he pushed them to the floor, put one hand on their back and the other at the base of their wing and_ pulled.

_Then Beelzebub did scream, not words, but a wild unholy sound that rattled every circle of Hell._

Dagon would be glad to file that memory away, slip it in a folder under S for _Screams_ and slam the drawer shut forever.

At least her old boss seems to be doing all right for themselves now. Dagon reads about them in the reports from Hell’s American operative. One of the newer political parties has nominated Beelzebub as their presidential candidate, and they’re campaigning all across the country.

Dagon mentioned this news offhandedly in her last meeting with the big boss, and he just shrugged—which was more or less the reaction she’d expected. For some reason, nobody in Hell seems to think Beelzebub is relevant anymore. The reports from America mention Beelzebub not because they’re the Lord of the Flies, but because they’re a political juggernaut. 

Gabriel, on the other hand, lost his chance for a nomination in some kind of “primaries” that don’t have anything to do with wings. Now he’s Beelzebub’s “running mate.” This makes sense to Dagon; she recalls that Gabriel liked to run.

She was a bit surprised by the archangel’s willingness to play a subordinate role in the public sphere, but maybe it’s a counterpoint to everything Beelzebub lets him do in bed. (Is it an invasion of privacy to use demonic magic to spy on your ex-boss’s sex life? Yes, it is. Does Dagon give a single shit? No, she does not.) Some of their activities are beyond disgusting, but some look downright fun. Dagon wouldn’t mind trying a few, if only she had a partner who could keep her interest.

Her thoughts are interrupted by the phone ringing, an ineffable coincidence. She picks it up. “Hello?”

“Eight o’clock tonight.” Michael’s voice is crisp. “St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

 _Aren’t you a sweetheart_ , thinks Dagon. “You know, there are easier ways to ask me to dance.”

But she’s too stiff for teasing. “I meant outside, of course.”

Dagon scoffs. “If it’s a cathedral you want, I’ll meet you at the Cathedral of Sewage.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Abbey Mills pumping station,” she explains. “Don’t worry, it’s abandoned—you won’t get any shit on you.”

Michael is silent for a moment. When she speaks, her voice has warmed from glacial to merely cold. “Sounds like you’re promising not to touch me.”

A grin splits Dagon’s face. “What’s a promise worth, from the likes of me?”

“Indeed. Hence my suggestion to meet at St. Paul’s.”

“So you could hide in the sanctuary if I made a pass?” This is getting into murky waters. Satan knows what Hastur would say if he overheard Dagon bantering with an angel like this.

Perhaps Michael is thinking along similar lines, because she cuts it off. “At the Cathedral of Sewage, then, evil spirit.”

“Yeah, seeya, prince of the heavenly host.” Trying to think of a clever way to say good-bye, Dagon remembers something Hastur told her. “Chow!” she exclaims, and slams the phone down triumphantly.

She’s got a date.

**Author's Note:**

> It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide which sexual activities constitute “disgusting” vs. “fun” to someone like Dagon.
> 
> I'm infinitely, ineffably grateful for comments & kudos.


End file.
